Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos in the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life

At once elegant and riveting, Sync tells the story of the dawn of a new science. Steven Strogatz, a leading mathematician in the fields of chaos and complexity theory, explains how enormous systems can synchronize themselves, from the electrons in a superconductor to the pacemaker cells in our hearts. He shows that although these phenomena might seem unrelated on the surface, at a deeper level there is a connection, forged by the unifying power of mathematics.

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

Visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term complexity can be misleading, however, because what makes West's discoveries so beautiful is that he has found an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena of living systems, including our bodies, our cities, and our businesses.

Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do

Can we scientifically predict our future? Scientists and pseudo scientists have been pursuing this mystery for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years. But now, astonishing new research is revealing patterns in human behavior previously thought to be purely random. Precise, orderly, predictable patterns.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Ge­nius, brings us his crowning work: a revelatory chronicle that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.

Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

What is economic growth? And why, historically, has it occurred in only a few places? Previous efforts to answer these questions have focused on institutions, geography, finances, and psychology. But according to MIT's anti-disciplinarian César Hidalgo, understanding the nature of economic growth demands transcending the social sciences and including the natural sciences of information, networks, and complexity. To understand the growth of economies, Hidalgo argues, we first need to understand the growth of order.

A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

Claude Shannon was a tinkerer, a playful wunderkind, a groundbreaking polymath, and a digital pioneer whose insights made the Information Age possible. He constructed fire-breathing trumpets and customized unicycles, outfoxed Vegas casinos, and built juggling robots, but he also wrote the seminal text of the Digital Revolution. That work allowed scientists to measure and manipulate information as objectively as any physical object. His work gave mathematicians and engineers the tools to bring that world to pass.

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future

We live in strange times. A machine plays the strategy game Go better than any human; upstarts like Apple and Google destroy industry stalwarts such as Nokia; ideas from the crowd are repeatedly more innovative than corporate research labs. MIT's Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson know what it takes to master this digital-powered shift: we must rethink the integration of minds and machines, of products and platforms, and of the core and the crowd.

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

All our lives are constrained by limited space and time, limits that give rise to a particular set of problems. What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of new activities and familiar favorites is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not: computers, too, face the same constraints, so computer scientists have been grappling with their version of such problems for decades.

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution: 25th Anniversary Edition

Steven Levy's classic book traces the exploits of the computer revolution's original hackers - those brilliant and eccentric nerds from the late 1950s through the early '80s who took risks, bent the rules, and pushed the world in a radical new direction. With updated material from noteworthy hackers such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Stallman, and Steve Wozniak, Hackers is a fascinating story that begins in early computer research labs and leads to the first home computers.

The Intelligent Web: Search, Smart Algorithms, and Big Data

As we use the Web for social networking, shopping, and news, we leave a personal trail. These days, linger over a Web page selling lamps, and they will turn up at the advertising margins as you move around the Internet, reminding you, tempting you to make that purchase. Search engines such as Google can now look deep into the data on the Web to pull out instances of the words you are looking for. And there are pages that collect and assess information to give you a snapshot of changing political opinion.

Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives

This audiobook explains why emotions are contagious, how health behaviors spread, why the rich get richer, even how we find and choose our partners. Intriguing and entertaining, Connected overturns the notion of the individual and provides a revolutionary paradigm - that social networks influence our ideas, emotions, health, relationships, behavior, politics, and much more. It will change the way we think about every aspect of our lives.

A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution

Not since the atomic bomb has a technology so alarmed its inventors that they warned the world about its use. Not, that is, until the spring of 2015, when biologist Jennifer Doudna called for a worldwide moratorium on the use of the new gene-editing tool CRISPR - a revolutionary new technology that she helped create - to make heritable changes in human embryos.

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Why do we do the things we do? More than a decade in the making, this game-changing book is Robert Sapolsky's genre-shattering attempt to answer that question as fully as perhaps only he could, looking at it from every angle. Sapolsky's storytelling concept is delightful, but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: He starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs and then hops back in time from there in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its evolutionary legacy.

The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don't even know how a pen or a toilet works. How have we achieved so much despite understanding so little? Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue that we survive and thrive despite our mental shortcomings because we live in a rich community of knowledge. The key to our intelligence lies in the people and things around us.

Garry Kasparov's 1997 chess match against the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue was a watershed moment in the history of technology. It was the dawn of a new era in artificial intelligence: a machine capable of beating the reigning human champion at this most cerebral game. That moment was more than a century in the making, and in this breakthrough book, Kasparov reveals his astonishing side of the story for the first time.

Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity

What are time and space made of? Where does matter come from? And what exactly is reality? Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli has spent his whole life exploring these questions and pushing the boundaries of what we know. Here he explains how our image of the world has changed over the last few dozen centuries.

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds

What is human consciousness, and how is it possible? This question fascinates thinking people from poets and painters to physicists, psychologists, and philosophers. From Bacteria to Bach and Back is Daniel C. Dennett's brilliant answer, extending perspectives from his earlier work in surprising directions, exploring the deep interactions of evolution, brains, and human culture.

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

Under the aegis of machine learning in our data-driven machine age, computers are programming themselves and learning about - and solving - an extraordinary range of problems, from the mundane to the most daunting. Today it is machine learning programs that enable Amazon and Netflix to predict what users will like, Apple to power Siri's ability to understand voices, and Google to pilot cars.

When retired four-star general Stanley McChrystal and former Navy SEAL Chris Fussell cowrote Team of Teams, they drew on their experience transforming the US military's Special Forces into a flexible and nimble force that could defeat Al-Qaeda's decentralized network in Iraq. They proved that the agility, adaptability, and cohesion of small teams could be scaled up to large organizations while breaking down the silos that frequently cause problems.

Machine Learning: The New AI: The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series

In this audiobook, machine learning expert Ethem Alpaydin offers a concise overview of the subject for the general listener, describing its evolution, explaining important learning algorithms, and presenting example applications. Alpaydin offers an account of how digital technology advanced from number-crunching mainframes to mobile devices, putting today's machine learning boom in context.

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

Everyone would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks, crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week's meals. Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts' predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight.

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

In this irreverent and illuminating audiobook, acclaimed writer and scientist Leonard Mlodinow shows us how randomness, chance, and probability reveal a tremendous amount about our daily lives, and how we misunderstand the significance of everything from a casual conversation to a major financial setback. As a result, successes and failures in life are often attributed to clear and obvious causes, when in actuality they are more profoundly influenced by chance.

Publisher's Summary

From a cocktail party to a terrorist cell, from an ancient bacteria to an international conglomerate - all are networks, and all are part of a surprising scientific revolution. A maverick group of scientists is discovering that all networks have a deep underlying order and operate according to simple but powerful rules. This knowledge promises to shed light on the spread of fads and viruses, the robustness of ecosystems, the vulnerability of economies - even the future of democracy.

Now, for the first time, a scientist whose own work has transformed the study of "links and nodes" takes us inside the unfolding network revolution. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi traces the fascinating history of connected systems, beginning with mathematician Leonhard Euler's first forays into graph theory in the late 1700s and culminating in biologists' development of cancer drugs based on a new understanding of cellular networks.

Combining narrative flare with sparkling insights, Barabasi introduces us to the myriad modern-day "cartographers" mapping networks in a range of scientific disciplines. Aided by powerful computers, they are proving that social networks, corporations, and cells are more similar than they are different. Their discoveries provide an important new perspective on the interconnected world around us.

Linked reveals how Google came to be the Internet's most popular search engine, how Vernon Jordan's social network affects the entire American economy, what it would take to bring down a terrorist organization like al Qaeda, and why an obscure finding of Einstein's could change the way we look at the networks in our own lives. Understanding the structure and behavior of networks will forever alter our world, allowing us to design the "perfect" business or stop a disease outbreak before it goes global.

Engaging and authoritative, Linked provides an exciting preview of the next century in science.

There are very few books that tell so much information in such a lucid way. This book is about one of the most important subjects in science and it is written in a way that is amazingly easy to understand. Quite an achievement.

This book is both instructive and entertaining. I have continuously recommended it to curious, intelligent, people, who want to know how the laws of networks permeate our lives and physical world. I am listening to it for the third time. RAW

I was very disappointed in this lightweight listen. The author is extremely proud of some elementary results that seem obvious to anyone with a serious math or comp. sci. background. He has so little to say that he repeats it many times. Links on the internet are not random! Are you amazed?

To make a book out of what should have been a short article, he then predicts marvellous advances in medicine based on his "discoveries," completely disregarding the problems of production and economic issues. If nanotechnology succeeds, will networkologists take credit?

A final nit: He uses the spread of AIDS as an example of a network, with patients as nodes and sexual contacts as links. However, many of his "facts" are wrong--he propagates myths that support his points but do not stand up under scrutiny. AIDS is not a "pandemic". People aren't virtually certain to die with 10 years of infection with HIV. Heterosexual contact does not spread AIDS. Kaposi's sarcoma is not caused by HIV and is not contagious.

This book did not teach me anything. Just a glimpse into how self-important academics can become.

I found the book extremely helpful in my understanding of community networks. There was enough science to connect the book to the "science approach." Nevertheless, it brought the ideas of networks outside of the normal scientific arena. As an educator I was able to use the concepts of networks in my own world of community building. I also love computers and the internet, thus finding these comparisons very helpful. Well done and worth my time.

It seemed a classic example of three interesting points spun out into a book-length treatment. The authors seemed unsure whether they were writing an instructional book for business networking, an academic treatise on networking theory, or their own curricula vitae. The result is maddeningly dry and circular.

The exhaustive explanation, discussion and criticism of obviously flawed and outdated networking theories is nothing but filler and occupies the bulk of book. Their unsupported extrapolations to politics and society are spurious and frequently laughable. Anyone interested in the subject should buy the paper version instead and skim aggressively.

F for the narrator. He obviously doesn't have a science background, which would be ok if only he would take the trouble to pronounce words correctly. With an audiobook, the pronunciation is key - the reader has no other means to know what the he*l is written down.

If you always wonder how 'small' our world is and how people are all interconnected to each other in this 'web', you will enjoy this book. Full of great real life examples and network theories. Be aware that lots of scientific wording, theories and examples are used in this book.. And if you don't like this type of technicalities, you may get bored and the book probably won't hold your attention.

I have a general science background and I loved this book because it relates our day-to-day network experiences to scientific theories. In special, I think people from the IT industry (or if you're keen on computers and internet) will find this book very interesting as the author uses lots of examples related to this industry.

I read this based on a colleague's recommendation, thinking I would spend most of my time thinking about networks in the sense of the "Internet." True, the internet is a prominent feature of the book, but the books real genius in its ability to see connectedness in economies, biology, social circles, and more.

Though written for a lay audience, parts of the book may get a little technical for some people's taste. But it is certainly not out of reach for those with at least some techno-tolerance.

This is a great book if you have a mind for math/logic. As a programmer I found great interest in the talk of highly connected networks as a new model of looking at the world. Wonderful listen, and definitely worth a second, third, or fourth time if are into the subject.